


Chained To A Comet

by crowleyshouseplant (orphan_account)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-31
Updated: 2011-10-31
Packaged: 2017-10-25 03:19:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/271163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/crowleyshouseplant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jimmy wakes up before Castiel. Set in 5.21 "Two Minutes To Midnight"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chained To A Comet

The first time Jimmy’s body dies, his soul doesn’t go to heaven. It just stays there, waiting, as Castiel goes elsewhere, light ribboning and unspooling before coalescing once more into the molten heart of a comet—once more Castiel.

He’s there, too, but he rattles around, it seems—not like before. Like he’s smaller somehow.

Like they’re both smaller and, maybe for the first time, there could have been enough room for them both if he weren’t a basement and if Castiel weren’t an entire planet trying to squish and squirm its way inside. But a planet, even a shrinking one like Castiel as the angel goes smaller and smaller, nearing the hellfire glow of individual apocalypse, is still a planet, and he’s swallowed it, swallowed it down whole until he is the planet’s night sky riddled with holes where the sun shines through like stars, pinpricks of light tearing into white dwarfs as his flesh thins, dead parts sloughing off even though there are no new cells to take their place, and the planet shrinks, and he wonders if this one will go out with a bang like before or a whisper. 

Ozone sears his lungs and he wakes up before Castiel in a hospital bed, damp bandages against his chest, pain heavy in his joints, fuzzing his head, soaking up the moisture from his mouth.

His mouth cracks open and a nurse hovers over him. 

“Hey,” she says. “Do you remember your name?”

And he blinks because he’s been here before with a person standing over him and he remembers saying something and his tongue tries to find the shape of the word but it’s blended into the fog of pain and, for some reason, his tongue doesn’t feel like his anymore, like he’s borrowing it, and he’s forgotten how to drive stick because he’s been on auto for so long that sheer rockfaces of the Grand Canyon are piles of dust that grit their way into children’s shoes as they play in the dark. 

He scratches at his arm, digs for the word in his skin. 

The nurse catches his hand and pats it down under the covers. “Don’t scratch. It’ll just make it worse. Nasty little bug bite,” she says. 

It itches and it hurts at the same time—big pain and little pain, like the little pain of having an angel supernova on the inside and the big pain of the body, scrap metal junk heap of space ship, plummeting through the atmosphere, burning. 

Castiel wakes up then. Castiel remembers how to speak. Not too surprising, he guesses, since Castiel is an angel watching over everybody, learning every language. Castiel’s not like him—who’s only been speaking for what? 

A long time and a short time. 

But for Castiel it’s just a long time and a long time and maybe even a longer time after that. Or before that.

He can’t really remember what time it is. 

He wonders if Castiel is going to start eating lunch.

But Castiel just says “Castiel” and he, the night sky with a dying sun, tugs and tugs and tugs and Castiel waits until the nurse leaves and he needs to know, wants to know, and he wonders, terrified, if this is even a language that Castiel understands and he wonders what other language there is to speak, but the only words he remembers are Father, Dean, Sam, Anna, Joshua, Michael, Lucifer, Death, Cage, Apocalypse which, he realizes suddenly, aren’t his words at all, no not really, and it’s raining, it’s raining so hard, and there will be a flood if it doesn’t stop soon and then everybody will die.

Castiel scratches at the bug bite. Then, voice hoarse, like it’s drawing up the vowels and the consonants from a well long gone dry, like the syllables are so dirty and dusty they catch on their breath and lodge in their throats on the way up because they’re just too old and gone and yellow for respectable viewing pleasure. “Jimmy.” 

And he remembers that yes, that is what he had said when he had been on his back before, and someone had leaned over him. 

“Claire,” Castiel says. “Amelia.”

The angel feeds Jimmy words that are his and he holds them in his mouth because if he swallows them they will be gone, and what comes in must come out.

“Morning waffles.” 

Jimmy is sick with pleasure when he remembers the part that Castiel has omitted: morning waffles with banana faces on the front. Claire always laughed, picked the face off first, eating them one smiley at a time. 

Castiel stops and Jimmy pleads for more because he’s starving. But Castiel just reaches for the bedside phone, dials a number. “Dean?”

And while Castiel speaks his language with Jimmy’s tongue, Jimmy sucks on the words that Castiel has reminded him, sucks on them like they’re silver spoons with the pudding long gone licked away, and wonders if he can turn their syllables into seeds so that they will sprout and grow and bear fruit under him the sky.  


End file.
